Revealed: Why Building an Email List is so Important Today (6 Reasons)

Are you considering building an email list, but have some doubts about why it is needed? Many bloggers and business owners don’t realize the importance of building an email list when they’re first starting out. Most people usually change their mind when they see the impact email lists can have on someone else’s traffic and revenue. In this article, we will share the top reasons why building an email list is important (with real case studies). We will also show you how to start building your email list – step by step.

In this beginner’s guide, we will cover the following topics:

What is an email list?

Why building an email list is important

Social media vs email marketing

What marketing experts are saying about email marketing

What do you need to start building an email list

How to choose the best email marketing service

How to grow your email list and get more subscribers

Finding new list building strategies and resources

By the end of this article, you should have answers to all your questions about building an email list.

What is an Email List?

An email list is a special list of names and email addresses of people who gave you permission to send them updates and promotions from your business.

Why Building an Email List is Important?

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the USA.

Because email subscribers joined your email list from your website and verified their identity by clicking on a link (double-optin), they are extremely interested in what you have to offer. This is why they are more likely to convert into paying customers.

This makes sense if you think about the reasons that make email an incredibly powerful communication channel:

1. Email is Personal

Email allows you to land into a user’s inbox. There is no ranking system limiting your reach. It is very direct and personal.

2. Email is Purposeful

To get updates from you, a user fills out a form to signup for your email list and confirm their email address. Someone doing this much work is obviously interested in hearing from you, and they are much more receptive to your message.

3. Email is Targeted

As we mentioned earlier, the user has already shown interest in your product or content. Since you already know what they like, you can deliver them highly relevant offers to get better results. This is called segmentation, and we will cover that later in the article.

4. You Own Your Email List

You do not own Facebook, Twitter, or Google. Your social media campaigns and SEO efforts can go to waste when these platforms change their policies. On the other hand, you own your email list, and it is not influenced by decisions of other businesses.

5. Email is One-on-One

People read email in the privacy of their inbox. The message is not on a public timeline or newsfeed. They can ask you questions directly in private with confidence. This helps build trust and connection.

6. More People Use Email Several Times a Day

You may have heard that Facebook has 1.4 billion and Twitter has 100 million daily active users. What you have may not have heard, is the number of people using Email every day.

Every internet user has at least one email account. A recent research conducted by Radicati found out that there 3.8 billion active email accounts. That’s half the population of Earth.

This is precisely why every smart business in the world has an email list.

Big name brands learned this lesson a long time ago, and that’s why they spend thousands of dollars on social media campaigns to get people to sign up for their email lists.

They understand that email marketing is the best long-term investment with a much higher return because people will continue to get their message at a very low cost for a longer period of time.

Social Media vs Email Marketing

Now you’re probably thinking, wait a minute. What about social media?

In fact, we have been asked several times isn’t email marketing kind of dead with social media taking over everything?

The best way to answer this question is to look at the information Twitter and Facebook ask you before you create an account:

Yup, it’s an email address.

These companies know that emails are the most direct and reliable way of getting in touch with their customers.

Even if you sign up using your phone number, they will keep asking for your email address to help you find friends, for password recovery options, and most importantly to send you targeted email messages.

Here is a view of the social tab in a typical Gmail user’s inbox.

All these emails are from big social media platforms, so they can engage you with the content on their platform and get you to visit their app or website again.

All social media platforms are building an email list because they are smart business owners. This helps their valuation when selling their business.

While social media is a great way to reach your audience, it’s important to keep in perspective the timely nature of social media platforms.

They come and go.

Not too long ago we had MySpace, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Plurk and countless others. Most of them are either dead now or irrelevant.

Today we have Facebook and Twitter that are prominent, but not everyone enjoys these platform. Some people prefer Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc.

Basically your users are all over the place on different platforms. But studies show that at least 91% of consumers check their email on a daily basis.

We are not saying that social media is not important. It is, and you should explore every opportunity to reach your audience.

However, you should spend more time and effort into something that guarantees higher results.

What Experts are Saying About Building an Email List?

Don’t take just our word for it, listen to what all top marketing experts are saying about email marketing:

Out of all the channels I tested as a marketer, email continually outperforms most of them.

– Neil Patel – Crazy Egg and QuickSprout

Getting an email address is the first critical step to figuring out who my reader is, and hopefully in the future, my customer of some sort.

– Joe Pulizzi – Founder Content Marketing Institute

If you’re not building an email list, you’re making a HUGE mistake.

– Derek Halpern – Founder Social Triggers

Email is the most predictable driver of growth and sales in our business. I prefer email marketing over all other traffic channels.
– Syed Balkhi – Founder WPBeginner

Many expert marketers say their biggest mistake was not building an email list when they first started out.

With all the reasons above, we hope that you’re convinced that building an email list is important for all businesses.

Now you might be wondering, how do I build an email list?

This brings us to the next section.

What You Need to Start Building an Email List?

By now, you know why building an email list is so important, and why ignoring it can be a HUGE mistake.

So let’s take a look at what you need to start building your email list.

3 Things You Need to Build an Email List:

A website or blog.

An email marketing service.

High-converting opt-in forms

All three of these are fairly easy to set up, and none of them require programming or design skills.

For the sake of this article, we will only be focusing on the last two items in the list. If you don’t have a website or blog yet, then see our step by step guide on how to start a blog or how to make a website.

Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service

There are tons of email marketing services out there. Often beginners use the free option to save cost, which is understandable. However, some of these free platforms are not the best. Why?

Some platforms mislabel themselves as “email marketing service” when in reality all they offer is free blog subscription via email. This allows your users to receive an email update every time you publish a new blog post.

But that’s not true email marketing. Here are some of the downsides of using a free blog notification service:

You can’t send out private email newsletters. To send an email, you will have to publish a new blog post, which means that the information you want to share will have to be publicly available first.

You can’t personalize the email message. It will be delivered in the same format often with no branding or personalization.

You can’t categorize subscribers by interests, demographics, or content type.

There is no reporting. You don’t know how many people got the email, what percentage of users opened it, and how many of them clicked on your links.

If you later tried to move to a paid service, your users will have to re-confirm their subscription. Many of them will not do it, and you will end up losing subscribers.

This is why we ALWAYS recommend using a professional email marketing service right from the beginning.

Yes, they cost a little bit of money, but they are an investment in your business which pays huge returns.

The benefit of professional email marketing services are:

You can send private mass emails to your subscribers.

You can see subscriber activity and group your subscribers based on actions they take.

You can run A/B split tests to see which email subject line, content, and offers work best with your subscribers.

With reporting tools, you can see which country you have the most subscribers from. You can adjust your time zone preferences, and send emails at the right time.

Last, but definitely the most important, you can see the email addresses of all your subscribers.

There are hundreds of professional email marketing services available. To make it easy for you, we have compiled a list of the top email marketing services based on ease of use, cost-effectiveness, features, and performance.

For small businesses, we recommend using Constant Contact because they are one of the largest email marketing services in the world.

They offer a 30 day free trial. This gives you plenty of time to set up and start seeing the results. At the end of 30 days, your email list would likely be paying for itself (cost $20 / month). Start your free trial.

If you’re looking for something more advanced that includes powerful marketing automation, then we recommend using SendinBlue or ConvertKit. They are both very popular among business owners, and they come with free trials as well.

Once you have signed up with an email marketing service, the next step is to add opt-in forms to your website to allow your users to subscribe.

Growing Your Email List and Getting More Subscribers

Did you know that more than 70% of visitors abandoning your website will never return? It’s true, just look in your Google Analytics and look at the percentage of new vs returning visitors.

That’s why you need to convert every website visitor into an email subscriber before they leave, so you can send them relevant messages to bring them back.

An average internet user spends just a few seconds looking at a website. This gives you very little time to engage them. If your email sign up forms are not noticeable, then users will leave without ever subscribing to your website.

The biggest mistake that we see beginners make is not strategically placing high-converting opt-in forms.

Some WordPress themes come with built-in sidebar widgets, but they don’t convert as well.

Your email marketing service may also provide you with codes to embed in your theme, but that requires you to know how to code.

This is why we recommend our users to use OptinMonster. It is the most powerful conversion optimization software that helps you convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers.

But what makes OptinMonster really powerful is the behavior automation and personalization features. OptinMonster allows you to automatically show different opt-in forms based on where the user is coming from, which page they are visiting, and what they are doing on your website.

For example, the Exit-Intent® feature track your users mouse behavior and show them a targeted opt-in form at the precise moment they are about to leave. This helps you convert abandoning visitors into subscribers.

Nicolas Gagne, a small business owner, combined Constant Contact with a single exit-intent optin to grow his email list by 500%. This helped him triple his revenue from his online store (see the full case study).

Note: OptinMonster was started by WPBeginner’s founder, Syed Balkhi, because he wanted to get more email subscribers, faster. It helped us increase our email signups by 600%. Due to popular request, we released this tool for public, and currently, it’s the most recommended lead generation software in the market.

List Building Strategies and Resources

Having the right tools is crucial, but knowing how to use them properly is what makes the most difference.

In your email marketing strategy, the most important thing you should plan out is segmentation.

What is email list segmentation?

Email list segmentation is the process of grouping your subscribers, so you can better personalize your emails based on interest.

It helps you get higher open rates and click-through rates. This definitive guide to email marketing has all the information you need to segment your email list like a pro.

Thanks for all this wonderful information. I write both fiction and nonfiction. I’m wondering if I need to create two lists that people could sign up for. Or should I just have one? The audiences have some overlap but are mostly different. How do I handle this, short of having two websites (which I don’t want to do)–I currently have one author website. Thanks for any advice.

Thanks for all this wonderful information. I write both fiction and nonfiction. I’m wondering if I need to create two lists that people could sign up for. Or should I just have one? The audiences have some overlap but are mostly different. How do I handle this, short of having two websites (which I don’t want to do)–I currently have one author website. Thanks for any advice.

Although I can see the benefit for some businesses I personally hate email lists, annoying pop ups trying to get you to subscribe etc. etc. It seems every site I visit now has the same annoying crap.
I have been operating my website since 2004, I’ve seen trends come and go. One thing I refuse to do is annoy my customers with ads on my site or annoying newsletter subscriptions. Does anyone agree or is the whole world trying to push their business down our throats for the sake of making as much money as possible. Does anybody care about user experience? If you’re good at what you do then you will be found

Every site i visit wants my email address and other perso info. I often end up giving it, but often i get so annoyed about my privacy being attacked and products being pushed that I close the site in question.

But, now i am trying to create a site that will really improve people’s lives, I really want them to subscribe to posts that could change their lives.

On the one hand, I feel angry to be bulked in with all those sites trying to sell “stuff”. BUT, I think that it’s best to be pushy, otherwise people will not think to leave their email. Then they will forget about us when they most need us. I am not selling anything, i just want to increase online communication between suffers of a specific chronic illness. Whether i obtain sponsorship from medical device companies is not sure.

I want to be honest and integral, cover my costs – if i can (with sponsorship) – and not annoy my current or prospective users. Because if they don’t visit, my site is doomed.

I too hate the pop-ups. It spoil the user experience. If I want to follow the websites, I bookmark them and visit time to time. For the customers or readers who want to get email newsletter, I would add that option in the side bar. Curious readers can add their email in the sider bar without spoiling their reading experience.

Yeah, The Money Is In The List, they say…
OK, I’ve been building a long list of emails.
What do I do with it now?
“How to squeeze the money out of it?” that is a question left unanswered here.
Any advise ?

When I set up an email list, I knew I would have both technical geeks as well as SciFi/Fantasy readers, so I created “groups”. When people opt-in to my mailing list, they pick one or the other (or both!) This lets me send emails targeted at each group that is more likely stuff they are interested in reading.

Hey there
Thanks a lot for this article! I am in the process of starting my own music YouTube Channel and would love to begin with building an email list right from the start..
I am not a business selling anything yet but for MailChimp I have to give a business address that will be shown in the newsletters. I dont wanna give away my private address as well but how can I still legally (with the opt-in and everything) collect email address and be able to send newsletters? Would you still recommend MailChimp for strategic purposes or do you have any other ideas?
Thanks a lot!!
Hope

Hi, Hope. I am in exactly the same boat. I am starting a new blog and getting subscribers to my website launch page; however, the site does not sell anything and does not have a physical address. Did you figure out a solution for your situation?

To comply with anti-spam law you HAVE to include an address. Mailchimp enforces that. Now you can plug in a PO Box if you wish to pay for that. It’s exactly the reason my wife and I set one up when she launched her own newsletter as she started building her reader fan list.

The fundamental idea is to give people something that aligns with the type of subscriber you seek. For example, if you wish to have a list of SciFi readers, a free SFF short story, book, or character dossier would be very appetizing to the sort of people you wish to attract. It can’t be something they can get from anywhere (like an Amazon gift card) but instead something genuine that you have created.

This was all helpful, Thanks! I was about to activate the Feedburner plugin on my WP-page, but after reading this, I will not.
I have a blog, where I write about my experiences living abroad, and all I want is a feature, that automatically sends email to the subscribers when I publish a new post.
It’s not my intention to send out newsletters – just the automatic notification about a new post.
That is why I thought Feedburner would be great for me. But would you still recommend me to use Mailchimp or something alike for this?

My wife has been wanting to start a mailing list for sometime now for her bakery business. She just operates from our own home, so it would be nice to have a way to branch out to our customers a bit. This helped us out a lot, and I liked your point about getting more personal with your customers through email. Thanks for sharing this.

Mailchimp could just be what I am looking for with regards to the mailing lists, however it looks quite daunting with all the questions regarding company information, I am just an individual who has a regular job and looking to sell ebooks in the future, can you advise please?
Thanks

This is extremely helpful, I’m going to start right away. Because I’ve started my fashion blog in August and I still did not know to do the email subscrption and nobdy explain it wel until I read this post.
Thanks a lot!
Maryam

I’ve recently create a WP blog–newbie and constantly being reminded. I have Jetpack installed. I used their subscribe via email widget. I have it in the footer. The subscribe buttons does not work at all. It’s like it’s not linked to anything, but I feel like I’m missing something.

On jetpack’s support page, they state this feature should be default and ready to go.

What am I missing here? Thanks for any insight. I have at least 2 hours into this.

Hi, I want to create a “sign up” button on my wp site where viewers can enter their name and email and then it AUTOMATICALLY adds them to my mailing list. Is there a way of doing that instead of entering each address manually? Could I do something like that through a simple gmail account or would I have to use a more complex program?
Thanks

If someone uses my e-mail address in an online mail shot (that they got with my consent) but have contacted me and not blind copied my e-mail in with others – essentially sharing my data with others – am I then able to use these e-mails for my own benefits in a mail shot (whilst ensuring all addresses are blind copied) but also ensuring there is an opt-out option in my e-mail

I am working on a site and trying out the sidebar widget position to add the optin form. I would like to know how did you create your subscription widget box located on the sidebar? I want something that gives subscribers the option to select just like yours.

Great guide, just what I was looking for but it is timing that is my question. I have just got my ecommerce website up and running selling “print on demand” (small run personalised printing) products. Have only a few items for sale so when should I try to create my email list.? Is 15 items in a shop too small so wait until I have say 50? Create a landing page that promises more in the future so sign up now? Not an easy one to find advise on. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ian, 15 items are enough to get your visitors curious so it is time to get them to signup or otherwise they will probably never know when you add new items. We have even seen signup forms on websites that are not even launched yet.

As a total beginner to all of this, there is a serious “learning curve” in just getting to this point. If all I want to do is create a mailing list – why do i have to have a third party mailing service if I use yahoo or gmail? Does this mean that I have to sign up with mailchimp or aweber? I find this all a bit confusing as to why i need to do this at all? and then what happens if in the future, i want to add this feature? right now i have no budget to pay additional fee-services, so it is just not an option. I find navigating all of this extremely confusing as a first time user of WP and setting up a site. Many of the plugins break my site and cause serious problems, so i am very leery on downloading additional plugins. most of them have 4-5 – star ratings but only have a few comments that created that rating. If you could consider taking one (or two) step(s) back and try to explain on a more basic level – i think that would really help beginners. I am finding all of this social media, feedburner, etc to be extremely time consuming and the blog comments i am getting are ALL advertisers, so I have marked them as spam and deleted them without displaying on my site.
I only wanted to to set up a site that displays information and have people come to my site to sign up as interested in what we have to say. If we decided to conduct further activities in the future, we can try that after we get past this “beginner” stage.
thank you in advance for your articles and site, to date, your site has been extremely helpful.

We understand how overwhelming and confusing this could be for a new user. But you will soon find out how useful it would be for you in the future. We would recommend you not to cover every thing quickly. Focus on building your site, bringing visitors, posting content. When you are stuck at something, focus on that specific problem and try to solve it using tutorials on our site or else where.

As for email services, well actually there is a limit on how many emails you can send from a free gmail or yahoo account. Sending out mass emails is considered abuse of service by these free email service providers. Your emails will either end up in spam folder of your users, or they will not recieve them at all. It is also possible that your email service can suspend your account for violation of terms of use. This is why you need a third party email service.

This was helpful and timely for me. I am in the planning stage and have been researching the various email services. One that i have come across that appeals me is GetResponse. But i have found limited info on this. Are you familiar with this service? How does it compare to aweber or mailchimp?

Alex GetResponse is a good service too. They have a smaller customer base than MailChimp or Aweber but they are definitely on the right track. You should consider your own options that will help you decide. For example, pricing, growth, support, reliability, deliverability, spam filters, etc. Make a list of these factors to compare on your own, you will also find such analysis around the web but those analysis could be biased towards one of the service. So you better do it on your own.

My website/blog has been around for about 3 years. I added the option to opt-in to be notified of my latest posts about a year ago. I get an email everytime somebody subscribes and that turned out to be about 1 or 2 a week.

In the last say 6 weeks, all of a sudden I’m getting at least 4 or 5 emails from my blog telling me someone signed up for my mailing list. I look at the email adresses and it seems to me a good 1/2 of them are bogus emails! What gives?

I understand fake people getting an account on your site so they can post a link to their own products or sites, looking for a linkbacks and such…. but I personally approve all comments and dont publish spam. I don’t understand why I’m getting such a high number of fake subscribers.

Which email service provider you are using? Proper email service providers like mailchimp or aweber come equipped with tools to deal with such signups. As for your email subscribers, you can check out this article on how we boosted our email list subscribers on WPBeginner.

In response to “bogus” email subscribers, I will tell you why it is done… because I do it myself. When I am forced to put in my email information just to get some free information, it irritates me. The reason it irritates me is because, I deal with many companies in my business, I can not afford the time to keep sifting through my inbox to delete 50 emails from a company that I just wanted a little information from. Email marketing optin is great, but keep in mind – not everyone wants the bombarding of emails after-the-fact.

That was great information, almost answering a questions I was asking myself. Even Mail Chimp is too complicated for me. I wish there could be something as simple as Jet Pack to build an e-mail list.

I have seen people get thousands of subscribers with JetPack. If people have double opted in, which I believe they have with JetPack….why can’t the e-mail addresses be viewable so you can send them e-mail?

Both mailchimp and aweber have too many features for someone that wants to keep it simple. I’ve tried both and went to JetPack. I’m sure a few simple features could be added to JetPack….keep it simple and charge a smaller fee, than aweber. I had and know others as well that got sold on aweber and never used it, paying a heafty monthly fee for nothing. That’s the way of the world now….get them to sign up, put it on their credit card and they forget about it and never learn how to use it. Helps pay for all the other people that spend endless hours on the helpline gobbling up the service reps time trying to figure it all out.

Pam, we are sure JetPack has nice features and all but it allows you to add a blog / comment subscription module only. On the other hand services like MailChimp and Aweber are professional email service providers offering many powerful features which allow you to really benefit from the email list you are building. As far as simplicity is concerned, we are slightly more inclined towards MailChimp, they have a great user interface even for absolute beginners, they have excellent documentation, and lots of resources to learn how to use each feature available.

Hi,
I’m really interested in Optin Monster and everyone talks or used MailChimp,
but I want to make sure I have it all clear as to what I need to do so I don’t stuff up my site! – I currently use Jetpack for email subs.

So first, I sign up with MailChimp for my website
then, I buy Optin Monster to increase conversion rate?
and is it all self explanatory how to set them both up and integrate into site? – yes, newbie blogger!

MailChimp is an email service provider. It allows you to collect email addresses and send newsletters. OptinMonster helps you gain more email subscribers by placing email signup forms at different spots on your website.

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WPBeginner is a free WordPress resource site for Beginners. WPBeginner was founded in July 2009 by Syed Balkhi. The main goal of this site is to provide quality tips, tricks, hacks, and other WordPress resources that allows WordPress beginners to improve their site(s).